A New Year's Letter by Nicole Beutler

2019, an anniversary year

Dear friends,

It is the middle of winter and all is nicely calm while we are heading into 2019, a special year for us because it marks many anniversaries: 10 years ago we started the company NBprojects, with a team of three, Janine Dijkmeijer and Josta Obbink were my partners. We are so lucky to be still going strong and just recently we changed our name into Nicole Beutler Projects. I have been making work for in and out of the theatre for more than 20 years, next to that I will turn 50, and last but not least 2019 is the 100 years Bauhaus anniversary! So many reasons to celebrate and to approach the year slightly different than usual.

First of all, In January we are continuing the tour of Liefdesverklaring (voor altijd), with a partially new cast. Make sure you don’t miss these theatre-beasts declaring their love and endless idealism for the theatre. At the end of January we are presenting COME TOGETHER #4, three days with 50 Amsterdam artists and their concerns in dance / performance / fine art / music in all spaces of Frascati. More about both projects hereunder in the newsletter.

In April we are re-staging 4: STILL LIFE our coproduction with Theater Malpertuis from 2013, first rehearsing in the magically located Dampfzentrale in Bern and then releasing it back into the theatres. Next to building up a repertory, we think about sustainability when we restage older works as we care for the work and investment that went into creating a piece. Now we bring back this Bauhaus-inspired duet with Marjolein Vogels and Benjamin Kahn in the year of the Bauhaus anniversary.

In May we are premiering the new work 8: METAMORPHOSIS at the Operadagen in Rotterdam, with an avant-premiere at the ITA in Amsterdam. Together with a great team of eight male dancers & singers, composers, light & space designers we are transforming the perception of the big stage, working with The Cold Song by Henry Purcell as a springboard for reflection on the emergence of a new time, celebrating the idea of transformation in a ritual towards the end of patriarchy. It is a challenge, but I am looking forward to it. (The rehearsals have already started…)

In June starts the international tour of ROLE MODEL, which I directed with Magne van den Berg, a coproduction with DOX. Festivals in Linz, Freiburg, Düsseldorf will be hosting us before we embark on a second Dutch tour in the autumn. Made for a younger audiences this work liberates ideas of appearance and celebrates diversity and female strength.

And last but not least: In November we will be presenting NBcollection 2019, a collection of works from the past years. I am so happy we are supported by our partners in town: Frascati and ITA, both hosting a fine selection of our repertory in the second half of november. Here are some of our plans: We are bringing to Frascati a very early piece: the exact position of things, created in 2003 still under the flag of the collective LISA. Now 15 years later the piece will be again performed by the original cast, Hester van Hasselt and Esther Snelder! Realised with my faithful collaborators Minna Tiikkainen and Gary Shepherd, this dark visually composed piece deals with the loss of knowledge as a consequence of Alzheimer’s disease, exploring the letting go of the boundaries of the known.

At ITA we are planning to re-stage the three big stage productions of the last years: 5: ECHO, 6: THE SQUARE and 7: TRIPLE MOON, works inspired by circle, square and triangle. In these works I am reflecting on the way we live together: the circle inviting ideas of circular time and early circular dances; the square appearing as polarising cultural sign, relating to the recent surge of populist power manifestations; the triangle seen as delta, as spiritual and feminine sign, in a dream-like triptych to the triple moon goddess, towards new feminism. But there will be more to be announced.

In 2019 we celebrate 20 years of making work for the theatre with a sense of idealism and engagement, in an attempt to make this world a slightly better place, promoting the immaterial, the poetry of the in-between, the not-yet-known, the complex, the ungraspable, promoting the balancing of the female and the male in all of us, as well as the power of the individual and collaboration on all levels.